[ Note: In the following text, written by Mike Weale to Mike Sutton, NTA refers to Matthew's 1831 book "On Naval Timber and Arboriculture"] This is the book that leading scholars agree contains the original complete hypothesis of natural selection, but that Darwin and Wallace claim not to have read before they replicated Matthew's discovery, his great analogy to explain it and many of his examples of its operation in nature.
Plese note: Forsdyke does not reveal the similarity of the picture drawn in text from Darwin - that is done by Weale. We might call this item of evidence "Weale's Entanglement Analogy". I am not sure it is particular evidence for plagirism in its own right. But if we add it to the far stronger evidence from my systematic and comprehensive plagiarism check - revealed in Nullius - it is, at least, rather curiously interesting.
Dr Weale writes:
Mike, were you aware of the following interesting similarity between a famous passage of Darwin’s, and something that Matthew wrote in NTA? I thank Donald Forsdyke for pointing out the Matthew quote (see the end of his last video in his educational video series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL59A9C65FB0DCED9E).
The Darwin quote, from the last paragraph of “On the Origin of Species”, is:
“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”
The Matthew quote, from pp.229-30 of NTA, is:
“Look at the broken mound, with its old picturesque trees and tangled bushes; there is the ancient root where the throstle had its nestlings, which are now at large on the leafy boughs, and are tuning their yet unformed notes to melody. Now every twig has raised its new column of foliage to the sun; and branch, and root, and stone, embellished all over in the richest variety of cryptogamic beauty, swarm of insect life.”
The scene is used differently (to contemplate Nature’s laws by Darwin, to contrast beautiful Nature with boring manicured parks by Matthew), but the similarity of the picture is striking.
